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Greek Foundation of Western Culture
The '''Greek Foundation of Western Culture' lasted from about 776 BC until 371 BC. It began with the end of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, which left a power vacuum that allowed for the emergence of Classical Greece. It then ends with the collapse of Greece unity and power, until forcibly reunited by the rise of the Macedonians and Alexander the Great. By the end of Classical Antiquity in the 6th century, a great period of foundation and acceleration had taken place, from the western Mediterranean to India and beyond to China. For Western civilisation, this foundation indisputably began with the Ancient Greeks. This was an era of war and conflict, first between the Greeks and the Persians, then between the Athenians and Spartans. Nevertheless, it ushered in an effervescence of culture unlike anything that had been seen before. Within four centuries, Greece had invented philosophy, drama, the Olympic Games, most of arithmetic and geometry, and the categories of Western art. They also gifted us our idealisation of democracy, and even our vocabulary for talking about politics. The ideas of these Greek thinkers would be spread far and wide thanks to the conquering exploits of Alexander, and later the Romans. History Emergence of Greek City-States The appearance of a new civilisation in Greece owed much to older eastern Mediterranean and Aegean traditions. The legacy of Minoan Crete (1900-1500 BC) and the later Mycenaean Greece (1600-1190) is reflected in Greek legends and literature: the Minotaur reflects the importance of the bull in Minoan religious life, and the heroes of Homer's epic Iliad and the Odyssey occupied Mycenaean palaces. Of the Minoans we know very little; even their name is taken from the name of a King Minos who, although celebrated in legend, may never have existed. Crete seems then, as today, to have been better for the production of olives and vines, two of the great staples of later Mediterranean agriculture, than either the other islands or mainland Greece. Archaeology reveals that trade was carried on round the entire Mediterranean coast, from Sicily in the west to Anatolia, Palestine, Egypt in the east. This seems to have been a prosperous society judging by the impressive ruins at Knossos, as well as remarkably peaceful; defensive walls are notably absent in Minoan Crete. Its peak came about 1600BC, and a century or so later, the Minoan palaces were destroyed. It is not known whether this was due to some natural cataclysm or a violent invasion, but the next generation of Cretan rulers introduced the culture of mainland Mycenae. In contrast, Mycenaean Greek civilization had a military style, as Homer suggests. They fortified their cities heavily, and contributed to the future one enduring symbol of Greek life, the fortress palaces on the high place of the town, or acropolis. One of the most important was at Mycenae, which gave its name to the civilization that finally spread over all of mainland Greece in the middle of the second millennium. Each considerable city had a king, presiding over a society of warrior landowners and peasant tenants and slaves. Mycenae replaced the Cretan trading supremacy in the Mediterranean with its own, and was treated as a power by Hittite kings. Royal burial tombs add to the impression of a powerful military society, containing a profusion of bronze swords and daggers, bronze-tipped spears, together with much gold treasure. In the latter half of the 13th century, according to well-established oral tradition, the rulers of Mycenaean Greece joined forces for a prolonged assault on Troy, the richest city on the Ionian coast of Anatolia (the Mediterranean coast of modern Turkey). If there is truth in this, the war perhaps fatally weakened the Mycenaeans, for their civilisation came to an abrupt end not very much later, at the hands of the marauding Dorians, uncivilised northern tribesmen. The decline of Greece was part of a wider pattern of chaos often called the Late Bronze Age Collapse; as far away as Ancient Egypt, the pharaohs struggled against invasion from the mysterious Sea People. From 900 BC, Greece began to emerge from these "Dark Ages", with Athens at the forefront; Athens had successfully resisted the Dorians, thus a genuine continuity exists from Mycenaean to Classic Greek civilisation. The year 776 BC was important in the history of this civilisation’s self-consciousness. The people who gathered for that first Olympic Games and later festivals, recognised that they shared a common culture, as well as a language, a writing system adapted from Phoenician script, and religion. Although we now call them Ancient Greeks, they would have called themselves Hellenes, a word used to distinguish the earlier inhabitants from the invaders. Greek communities had local gods, but there was a central pantheon shared by all. The shrine at Delphi, in particular, brought worshippers from all over Greece; the sources of respected if enigmatic advice, and was believed to be the centre of the world. Yet such social ties were never politically binding. The geography of Greece always favoured small self-contained city-states, and independence was fiercely defended; unification was something rarely even contemplated by the Greeks themselves. Foremost among them were: Athens, the centre of the arts, learning and philosophy; Sparta with its militaristic slave society that made it something of a famous oddity; Corinth, who dominated early Greek trade with seafaring advantage from its position astride an isthmus; Argos, one of the oldest cities, whose citizens traced their lineage back to the mythical days of the Trojan War; Thebes; Rhodes; and Delphi. Meanwhile from about 750 BC, trade, overpopulation, and necessity had driven a great period of Greek expansion and colonisation; only in very small patches did its land and climate offer the chance of agricultural plenty, and minerals were rare. By the end of it, in the sixth century, the Greek world stretched far beyond the Aegean: along the Ionian coast of Anatolia (western coast of modern Turkey); Byzantium (modern day Istanbul); Syracuse in Sicily; Magna Graecia in southern mainland Italy; Marseilles on the southern coast of France; and the fertile shores of the Black Sea. Rivalry with a large and aggressive neighbour, Lydia in Asia Minor, gave added impetuous to Greek restlessness; the last king of Lydia, Croesus (d. 547 BC), has survived in popular memory as a man of legendary wealth. Greek Political Innovation From the 7th-century BC, Greece passed through a dramatic stage of political upheaval. Initially, all the city-states were petty kingdom, but gradually monarchy gave way to the rule by an aristocratic oligarchy in most city-states; it remains unclear exactly how this change came about. Inevitably, the domination of politics by small groups of wealthy families was apt to cause unrest, and in many cities a tyrant would at some point seize power for himself. In Athens for example, in 560 BC a popular general, Peisistratus, emerged as something of a benevolent dictator, and ushered-in an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity for the city. Peisistratus’ son was toppled by the Athenian aristocrats, eager to get power back into their own hands, but this only hastened their own demise. A popular politician named Cleisthenes took charge in 508, and established a radical solution. Athenian Democracy was a system of direct democracy, in which political decisions, from the raising of taxes to the building of roads, were taken by majority vote of an assembly of all citizens, regardless of wealth. Citizenship, of course, was restricted to a small proportion of the people in the city-states; women could not be citizens, and nor could slaves, who made up about 25% of the population of Greece. This form of direct democracy gradually spread to numerous other city-states too. Citizens of all the Greek city-states took a passionate interest in the affairs of their city, violently arguing the merits of the two rival forms of Greek government. Sparta and Athens, the two most powerful city-states, became inexorably associated with aristocratic oligarchy and democracy respectively. Any city-state scheming to replace an oligarchy would appeal to Athens for help, and similarly those opposed to democracy would look to Sparta. Yet herein lies one of the secrets of the Greek achievement. It could draw upon a rich variety of political experience, providing data for the first systematic reflections upon the great problems of law, duty and obligation. Rise of Persia During the Late Bronze Age Collapse that followed the splintering ot the Hittite Empire in 1178 BC, the Near East was a chaos of short-lived petty-kingdom, and migrating peoples. Of the peoples, it was first the Medes who first played the dominant role, establishing themselves as neighbours and then conquerors of Assyria in 612 BC. The Medes controlled much of Iran, apart from the southwest on the Gulf, the heartland of Persia. The balance rapidly changed when Cyrus the Great (559-530 BC) became king of the Persians. In 549 BC, he humbled Medes, capturing their king and their capital, Ecbatana. Thenceforth the boundaries of conquest rolled westward, swallowing Greece's rival Lydia in 547, and extending his power to the Greek cities of the Ionian coast. Babylon, Syria and Palestine fall to him next, in 539. The basis of the first Persian empire, Achaemenid Persia (550-330 BC), had been set in place within a mere eleven years, an empire which, though with setbacks aplenty, provided a framework for the Near East until the rise of Islam in the 7th-century AD. Thus Greek civilisation was now confronted with her defining challenge; the Greco-Persian Wars. For all the great enmity between Greece and Persia, Cyrus was in fact quite an enlightened ruler. As he created the largest empire the world had seen until that time, he saw himself with some justification as a liberator; people succumbed to this conqueror partly because they believed it in their interest to do so. Cyrus was careful to respect the institutions and ways of his diverse subjects, as long as they didn't revolt and paid their taxes. While the Persians were themselves Zoroastrian, an early form of monotheism, they were remarkably tolerant of other religions; making a point of respecting the Babylonian religion, and allowing the Jews to return from their Babylonian captivity to Jerusalem, where Cyrus launched the rebuilding of the Temple. The Persians improved infrastructure with roads and introduced a pony-express mail service that could convey messages at 200 miles a day. And the practice of slavery was far less widespread than in other contemporaries, including Ancient Greece. The brief reign of Cyrus's son, included another important extension of the empire; Egypt in 525. During the long rule of Darius I (522-486 BC), the Achaemenid Persian empire reached its greatest extent; from Thrace and Macedonia in the west, to northern India in the east. The Persian army behind these conquests famously contained an elite corp known by a brilliant piece of propaganda as the immortals, for the simple reason that there were always 10,000; in theory as soon as one died, another soldier was ready to take his place. Greco-Persian Wars The Greco-Persian Wars (499-479 BC) was sparked when the Greek-speaking cities of Ionia rebelled against Persian rule in 499 BC, supported to a limited extent by Athens. The revolt ultimately failed and left Greece facing an enraged Persia. Under Darius I (522-486 BC), the Persians launched her first invasion of Greece. A Persian fleet landed an army at Marathon, a plain to the north of Athens, and the Athenians and her allies opted to meet them in battle; the Battle of Marathon (490 BC). Famously, a messenger named Pheidippides ran 150 miles in two days to seek help from the Spartans, but a religious festival prevents them from setting off for six days; they would arrive two days after the battle. At Marathon, 10,000 Greek hoplites defeated perhaps 25,000 Persians, through the clever use of terrain to nullify the fearsome Persian cavalry. The lightly armed Persian infantry were then no match for the disciplined Greek Phalanx; in a Phalanx, heavy-armed infantry fought in a tightly ranked block, with shields interlocked for protection, allowing the first three ranks to fight with spears, and the back ranks to inexorably push them forward. After Marathon, no one doubted that the Persians would return, but the death of Darius in 486 BC extended the lull before the storm. In the intervening years, a rich new vein of silver was discovered near Athens, prompting the statesman Themistocles (494-459 BC) to persuade his fellow citizens to apply this windfall to building the strongest navy in Greece. When the Persians came again in 480 BC under Xerxes I (486-65 BC), it was with a vast host perhaps 100,000 strong, and with a naval fleet following the coastline to provision the army. In response, almost all the Greek city-states agreed to combine their forces. However, the allies received news that Xerxes was already approaching the pass of Thermopylae, during a period of truce owing to the Spartan festival of Carneia. In the crisis, Leonidas, one of the two Spartan kings, and his personal bodyguard of 300 men, with some 6,700 other Greeks, resolved to confront them at the narrowest part of the pass. At the legendary Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC), on two successive days, Leonidas’ small force held-off the vast army, with heavy Persian casualties. The impasse was ultimately resolved by the treachery of a Greek peasant called Ephialtes who led the Persians along goat-paths behind the Greek lines. Leonidas, aware he was being outflanked, dismissed the bulk of the Greek army and remained to guard their retreat with his 300 Spartans and some 1100 Thespians and Thebans, selling their lives at a high price; an enduring monument to Spartan discipline and valour, captured in a famous epitaph: “''Stranger, go tell the Spartans that we lie here, obedient to their laws.” In the aftermath, the Athenians were forced to abandon their city to the Persians; Xerxes ordered it reduced to rubble. Meanwhile, the Greek fleet made for the narrow strait of Salamis to lure the Persian navy into an ambush. At the naval '''Battle of Salamis '(480 BC), the Persians threw-away their numerical advantage in the cramped conditions where numbers became an active hindrance, and the Greek triremes rammed and sank their opponents as the panic spreads; the Greek victory was overwhelming. Having lost the ability to reprovision his army, Xerxes chose to retreat back toward Persian occupied Thrace. The war came to a conclusive end during the retreat at the Battle of Plataea (179 BC). With the Greek fleet pursuing their navy back across the Aegean, the Persian army faced the allied Greeks under Spartan general Pausanias. Plataea was something of a cautious affair over 11 days, decided by which side could use its decisive advantage; the Greek phalanx or the Persian cavalry. Ultimately, the Greek victory was decisive, and opened an age of huge self-confidence for the Greeks. Greek Golden Age For thirty years after Plataea, the war with Persia dragged on, but with survival assured, the Spartans had gone home, content to return to their policy of isolationism. This left her great rival Athens undisputed leader of those states that wanted to press on with liberating the Greek cities still under Persian rule. The Delian League, as it became known, supported a common fleet and army under Athenian command, and achieved several significant victories against the Persians. They campaigned in Thrace and the Aegean islands throughout the 470s and in Asia Minor by the early part of the next decade. Over time, the League became in effect an Athenian Empire, in all but name. Athens’ naval supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean gave her great economic power, and money flooded into the city to fuel the rebuilding of Athens; an Athenian Golden Age (478-431). Under the statesman and orator Pericles, Athens was rebuilt more splendid than ever, with its crowning glory the Parthenon, one of the most astonishing buildings of the ancient world. Athenian democracy also reached new heights, with citizens encouraged to dedicate themselves to public service by the introduction of a special salary for participation. The period also marked the zenith of Athens as a centre of the arts and learning. Many of the most important Greek thinkers of the day, lived in Athens during this time: the dramatists Aeschylus (d. 456 BC), Sophocles (d. 405 BC), Euripides (d. 406 BC), and Aristophanes (d. 386 BC); the physician Hippocrates (d. 460 BC); the philosophers Socrates (d. 399 BC) and Plato (d. 347 BC), the historians Herodotus (d. 425 BC) and Thucydides (d. 400 BC), the poet Simonides (d. 468 BC), and the sculptor Phidias (d. 430 BC). Greek Division and Decline The behaviour of Athens towards its supposedly partners in the Dalian League soon became that of an imperial bully, even after peace was made with Persia in 449 BC. Naxos, for example, which tried to leave the alliance, was besieged back into it. Meanwhile, tension with her old rival Sparta gradually grew, with Athenian hegemony meddled in the internal politics of the Greek states, and Sparta had increasing difficulty in retaining the loyalty of the members of her own Peloponnesian League. Great trading states such as Corinth felt themselves threaten by Athens too. The materials thus accumulated for a coalition against Athens, and Sparta eventually took the lead in it. There were not very determined open hostilities for the fifteen years after 460 BC, but it was in 431 BC that the great struggle began, that would ultimately end in the mutual destruction of both Athens and Sparta; the Peloponnesian War '(431-404 BC). The underlying pattern of the war was a dispiriting routine based on two unchangeable facts: the Spartan army was almost irresistible on land; but the famous walls of Athens and her powerful navy made her virtually impregnable. Every summer, the Spartans marched north and spent a month destroying the Athenian crops, while the farmers sheltered in the city. When plague struck the city during the second summer, eventually killing perhaps a third of the population and robbing it of the leadership of Pericles, even this could not break the strategical deadlock. Yet Athens survived even this, and Sparta suffered her own occasional defeats closer to home, at the hands of soldiers landed from Athenian ships. The case of Melos shows the war in all its brutal light. This small island city-state offended Athens by insisting on remaining neutral, so in 416 BC the Athenians besieged the city into submission; all the males of the island were killed, and the women and children sold into slavery. The turning point in the war was the disastrous Sicilian Expedition (415-413). If Athens could capture Syracuse, the most important colony of Corinth, it would both decisively wound her enemy, and provide immense booty. It was decisive, but as a death-blow to the ambitions of Athens; half her army and almost all her fleet were lost. In 414, the Spartans sought and obtained an alliance with the Persian king, with a secret clause allowing Persia to regain control of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, towards which Sparta felt no obligations. The Persians provided the funds for the establishment of a Spartan navy to rival that of Athens. The end came suddenly in 405 BC, when the Athenian fleet was surprised and defeated near the Hellespont. This time blockade and starvation was decisive, and Athens capitulated a year later. Sparta's terms were remarkably lenient by the standards of the day; no one was killed or enslaved, no temples destroyed, but Athens was stripped of her overseas possessions, and the great walls protecting the city and her port were systematically demolished. The humiliation of defeat would bring the harshness of Athenian democracy to the fore. The renowned philosopher Socrates had long been the most vocal critic of the Athenian political elites. In 399 BC, he was put on trial on the dubious charge of corrupting the youth of the city-state; he was found guilty and executed by self-administered poison. There followed a brief Spartan hegemony, but her deeply conservative social structure was ill-equipped to provide the necessary leadership. Ironically, the Spartans soon became as hated as the Athenians had been. Instead Athens recovered sufficient prestige to put together another alliance, that proved strong enough to defeat the Spartan navy at the Battle of Naxos (376). A few years later, to the astonishment of all Greece, the Spartan army was defeated at the Battle of Leuctra (371) by an ambitious newcomer, Thebes, thanks to the revolutionary tactics of the general Epaminondas. Leuctra put an end to the idea of one city-state establishing hegemony over Greece. Yet this would ultimately leave the city-states vulnerable to a new threat from the north, the remorseless rise of Macedon. Although the glory days of Classical Greece were over, her enormous influence would endured for centuries, as a haven for study and discussion. Some of their greatest thinkers lived long after the so-called decline of Greek civilisation: the philosophers Aristotle (d. 322 BC), Epicurus (d. 270 BC), and Zeno (262 BC); the mathematicians Euclid (285 BC) and Archimedes (d. 212 BC); the physician Herophilos (d. 280 BC); and astronomers like Aristarchus (d. 230 BC), Eratosthenes (d. 194 BC), Hipparchus (d. 120 BC). In the end the Greeks are remembered as poets and philosophers; it is an achievement of the mind that constitutes their major claim on our attention. And the ideas of these Greek thinkers would slowly spread across the world, from Britain to north-western India, thanks to the conquering exploits of the Alexander the Great and the Romans. Greek would become the ''lingua franca of the Roman Empires as much as Latin, especially over all the Near East and much of the Mediterranean. Emergence of the Roman Republic In the middle of the 4th-century, few would have pointed to the Romans as the ultimate successors of the Ancient Greeks. The city that became Rome is an obvious place for a prosperous settlement. The Tiber is a natural barrier across the land route which runs up and down the west coast of Italy, between the two most prosperous early regions; the Etruscans to the north, and the the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia in the far south. Fifteen miles upstream, but not so high that she could not be reached by sea-going vessels, the river can be bridged and there are several steep hills providing natural defences. Rome was the northernmost settlement of the tribal Latin people, bordering the more developed federated city-states of the Etruscans. The Etruscans remain a mysterious people, but somehow they developed an advanced culture heavily influenced by the Ancient Greeks: they were literate, using an alphabet derived from Greek; brought metallurgy to a high level and vigorously exploited the local iron deposits; and were relatively rich. The earliest years of Rome are shadowed in mystery, because the city was sacked in 390 BC destroying most of the early written records; all we have are the stories the Romans told themselves. According to the Roman founding myth, the city’s founded in 753 BC by Romulus and and his twin Remus, who were supposedly suckled by a she-wolf as orphan infants; another symbol of early Rome’s debt to the Etruscans, among whose cults has been traced a special reverence for the wolf. The twins were also supposedly descendants of a Trojan prince, thus the Romans linked their civilisation with the Ancient Greeks they so admired. Romulus supposedly killed his brother thus becoming the first king of Rome. According to traditional accounts in 250 years, the Roman Kingdom was ruled by a succession of seven kings of Rome. Rome’s customs, religion, and style of warfare all date from this era, including such peculiarities as predicting future events through examining the livers of sacrificed animals. Fertilised by Greek influence via the Etruscans, the Romans became a literate society of settled farmers, with laws, and a well-equipped and well-disciplined army. During this time, Rome gradually grew from an upstart village, to dominate over all the underdeveloped Latin settlements, controlling some 50 miles to the south of Rome on the west coast of Italy. Rome’s era as a kingdom came to a sudden end, with the overthrow of the last king, the tyrannical Tarquin the Proud. Roman legend provides a dramatic story to account for this rebellion. Tarquin's son raped a noblewoman of exceptional virtue, who made the crime public, and then stabbed herself. This outrage provoked a popular uprising, led by Lucius Brutus. From that point on, the Roman people swore an oath never to again suffer a king to rule Rome. Another story tells how Brutus condemned to death his own two sons for conspiring to restore the Tarquin dynasty, firmly implanting the virtue of putting the interests of the republic above even family. The traditional date for the founding of the Roman Republic is 509 BC. This is probably not far from the truth, but orchestrated to pre-date the establishment of Athenian Democracy in 507 BC. Theoretically, ultimate sovereignty always rested with the people, concisely expressed through the motto SPQR or "the Roman Senate and People". The general conduct of business was the concern of the '''Roman Senate, already in existence as an advisory body to the kings. The senate consisted of some 300 members, whose appointment was for life. Two officials elected from among her own number became joint heads of state. The Consuls, each with a veto on the actions of the other and elected only for one year, ensured that power could never be concentrated in just one man. They were bound to be men of experience and weight, for they had to have passed through at least two subordinate levels of elected office, as Quaestors and Praetors, before they were eligible; Rome was rarely short of able men. To avoid stalemate in a crisis, the constitution provided for another more powerful office, an overall leader with the title of Dictator, for a period of no more than six months. That this constitution worked well for a long time is indisputable, but the actual working of the Republic was not as democratic as they appeared on the surface. The system was perfectly designed for a small oligarchy of rich aristocratic families to rule and dispute the right to office among themselves; the Patricians. The early internal struggles of the Roman Republic were between these Patricians, and the common people or Plebs. It culminated in the Secession of the Plebs (494 BC), where the Plebs simply abandoned the city en masse, and threatened to found a city elsewhere. Relatively bloodlessly, the Patricians eventually gave in to the pressure. The result was the creation of a powerful new office elected by popular vote, the Tribunes of the Plebs. They could initiate legislation or veto it, and acted as a check on the power of the Senate, to safeguard plebeian rights. Thus the Roman Republic did provide many of its citizens with a say in how their city was ruled. And the quarrels of men were regulated by a common law, first consolidated of the Twelve Tables (450 BC), which little Roman boys had still to learn by heart hundreds of years later. During the 5th century BC, while Ancient Greece was engaged in it epic struggle with Persia, the infant Roman Republic faced many challenges as it grew into adolescence, both internal and external. Internally, grain shortages and famine periodically struck the city, while tension between Plebs and Patricians continued to simmer just beneath the surface; a tension that would persist for the duration of the Republic. Meanwhile, the subjugated Latin settlements attempted to revolt against Rome’s dominance in 496 BC, but Rome's superior military forced them back under control; Roman soldiers form up for battle in a Greek Phalanx. Throughout these internal struggles, the Romans were held together by an unceasing series of defensive wars against their external neighbours; to the north the Etruscan city states especially her closest neighbour Veii, and to the east numerous nomadic hill-tribes. To the south lay the more docile immediate neighbours of Campania and Naples. The final clash with their local rivals, Veii, erupted in 400 BC. At that time, the Etruscans were already under pressure: migrating Celtic Gauls were entering their territory from the north into the Po river valley; and the ascendency of Syracuse, after their recent defeat of an Athenian invasion, meant Sicily now dominated that part of the Mediterranean, cutting-off the Etruscans from allies. After four years of war and siege, the Romans sacked and pillaged Veii. This precipitated the general decline of the Etruscans, squeezed between the Gauls in the north and an expansionist Romans in the south. Flushed with victory against the Etruscans, the Romans would find that they had only opened the cork in the bottle of central Italy. The Romans found themselves helpless against the Gauls under the chieftain Brennus, marauding south through Italy in search of booty. After suffering a crushing defeat at the Battle of Allied River (390 BC), the Gauls pursued the fleeing Romans back to Rome. The city was sacked, and much of it burned, before they departed north again. The Gauls would remain a bogeyman for the Romans until Julius Caesar finally exorcised their fears in 50 BC. In the aftermath of the humiliating sack, Rome recovered astonishingly quickly under the leadership of the statesman Marcus Furius Camillus (d. 365 BC), who was honoured with the title of the Second Founder of Rome. Within a generation the Roman Republic was once again the dominant power in central Italy. Category:Historical Periods